Group offers budget ideas

18 suggestions for $59M draft budget

Mar. 9, 2013

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VINELAND — A volunteer civilian committee formed to offer advice on the municipal budget process last week handed 18 recommendations to Mayor Ruben Bermudez after reviewing a $59 million draft budget and several hundred pages of documents.

“There are some things you have to really look into,” Bermudez said Friday about the findings. “There are some things I don’t think we can do at this time. That’s why I want to review with Council President (Anthony) Fanucci to understand what the recommendations are.”

Bermudez said his business administrator and comptroller got the recommendations late Thursday. The findings were given to Fanucci on Friday with an expectation of a meeting, he said.

The mayor said he would release the proposals after meeting with the council president.

Fanucci said Friday he had not reviewed the proposals, yet.

“I’m going to review the findings given to me over the weekend in preparation for a meeting with the mayor,” Fanucci said. “And also at that time get a firm idea where the draft budget stands so I can get that disseminated to the council.”

Fanucci said he looks to meet with the mayor on Tuesday or Wednesday, if possible. He said he was not opposed to disclosing the proposals to the public ahead of the meeting.

The 18 recommendations touch on issues such as overtime compensation policy and departmental coordination, according to the head of the Mayor’s Budget Advisory Committee. The group is disbanded now, he said.

“They cover everything and anything,” committee chairman Joseph S. Donchez said. “Basically, we were looking for avenues of extra money and we were looking for cost efficiencies.”

Donchez, who owns American Transport Systems, said members were asked to keep confidential details of the proposals until the mayor was ready to release them. He would discuss findings generally, though.

Donchez said the group did not make a specific recommendation on the property tax rate, but it did urge that any tax increase be “minor, not major.”

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“Our committee was very much concerned with foreclosure, with houses that would not be able to afford a substantial tax increase,” he said. “There were proposals that dealt with fees but they were struck down.”

The group, he said, also rejected a proposal to increase the mayor’s salary. The current $30,000 salary for a “part-time” mayor is too low given the demands of the office, he said.

“Who in his right mind would do that for $30,000 a year?” said Donchez, who was in favor of increasing the salary. “The guy’s busy day and night. He can’t tend to his business. It’s ridiculous. The lowest paid person in my company earns more than $30,000.”

Donchez said the proposals generally are for long-term solutions to be implemented gradually. Also, the proposals tend to address policies in place now rather than suggesting new ones.

“One of the issues we dealt with was the compensatory time fund, which we think is not advantageous for the city,” Donchez said. “People who work overtime can elect to have that money paid to them when they retire. When you consider the number of people in the city, and a lot of them take advantage of that, you can get into some big numbers.”

Donchez said, for example, the city would have to pay out about $7 million in overtime were every worker to suddenly retire.

“This is the kind of thing that doesn’t stabilize the budget of the city because of the amount that we owe and it continues to grow,” he said. “We thought we would suggest some parameters there. I wouldn’t want something like that in my business.”

Donchez said the review also encompassed the roles played by various municipal authorities and the impact of the recent city-wide property revaluation.

“I think we probably had 30, 35 proposals,” Donchez said. “But we ended up with 18 because I had asked them not to be kind of anybody in regard to proposals but to discuss that which we thought would help the mayor, the council and the city.”

Donchez said the mayor stopped in for portions of each committee meeting. After discussions at the second meeting, members individually prepared proposals for discussion and voting at their final meeting. The seven-member committee met three times in February, wrapping up on Feb. 28. The proposals, reached by majority vote, were turned over to the mayor on March 1.

“We had representatives from accounting, banking, business and a former school teacher and asset management and so on,” Donchez said. “So, we thought we had a pretty good committee.”

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